This week at Microsoft's MIX11 Web developer conference, the company surprised many by making a pre-release version of Internet Explorer 10 availableless than a month after IE9 came out in its final form. But another surprise was uncovered by Computerworld's Gregg Keizer: the next IE won't run on any OS before Windows 7, including Vista.

Microsoft took some heat when it came out that Internet Explorer 9 would leave millions of Windows XP users in the lurch, as the new browser would only run on Windows 7 and Vista. But the company confirmed that IE10 won't even run on Vista. In a statement to Computerworld, the company said "Windows Vista customers have a great browsing experience with IE9, but in building IE10 we are focused on continuing to drive the kind of innovation that only happens when you take advantage of the ongoing improvements in modern operating systems and modern hardware."

If users try to install IE10 Platform Preview on a Vista machine, they'll receive an error message and the installer software will shut down.

Microsoft's contention is that the browser is only as good as the operating system on which it runs, and that IE should take advantage of modern hardware interfaces using the latest DirectX APIs included with Windows 7. This is how IE can attain impressive performance on graphics-intensive demos like those on Microsoft's IETestdrive site. But the decision to drop Vista is probably based more on marketing needs than technical ones, since Vista uses the same DirectX version as Windows 7.

Luckily for Microsoft, and the users, Vista is fading off into the past. Most businesses didn't make the upgrade to that OS version, and recently Windows 7 overtook XP in market share; Windows 7 passed Vista in market share more than a year ago. Globally, however, XP is still the most widely used operating system, according number from StatCounter. So the loss of Vista support in IE10 is probably less significant, still, than the lack of support for Windows XP.

About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S... See Full Bio

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